"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis
"I don’t believe
in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze

Note on Citations

The numerical citations refer to page number. The source's text-space (including footnote region) is divided into four equal portions, a, b, c, d. If the citation is found in one such section, then for example it would be cited p.15c. If the cited text lies at a boundary, then it would be for example p.16cd. If it spans from one section to another, it is rendered either for example p.15a.d or p.15a-d. If it goes from a 'd' section and/or arrives at an 'a' section, the letters are omitted: p.15-16.

Just as soon as we sense something now, we at the same time project upon that sensation a memory from the past. Together they form a perception. Those contractions then immediately contract with the forthcoming perception. So in a sense, the past never goes away. And also, we are never in a pure instantaneous present.

Bergson now addresses the question of how these past perceptions are preserved in our memories. But he explains that perceptions never cease existing. They merely cease being useful. So all remembered perceptions have been contracted together already, and they all are found in this current moment that is bridging the past and the present. However, we only notice the ones that are relevant for attending to our current sensation.

If we think that perceptions happen within an instantaneous present, “the indivisible limit which divides the past form the future,” then we are speaking of nothing, really. For, if we consider the present in terms of what is about to begin to happen, then it is not yet existing. But if instead we regard the present as what is currently passing, then we are thinking of it as just having been, and thus also as not existing. (193d)

So our consciousness does not experience the present as being instantaneously now. Rather, the present for us involves the immediate past as well.

in truth, every perception is already memory. Practically we perceive only the past, the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.

Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impending over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it. Solely preoccupied in thus determining an undetermined future, consciousness may shed a little of its light on those of our states, more remote in the past, which can be usefully combined with our present state, that is to say, with our immediate past: the resent remains in the dark. (194a.c)

We only notice the parts of the past that are relevant now. That makes us think that when we do not notice them, they must be stored somewhere else. But really, they are all always there in every perception we undergo, and we ignore most of them for practical purposes. (194d)